Interview: Alix E. Harrow (STARLING HOUSE)
We are excited to bring you an interview with Alix E. Harrow about her newly released novel Starling House, out now from Tor Books. “A grim and gothic new tale from author Alix E. Harrow about a small town haunted by secrets that can’t stay buried and the sinister house that sits at the crossroads of it all.” In addition to this interview, you can read an excerpt from the novel online at Tor.com. For more details on the novel and its author, please read the official book blurb and author information that follow the interview. Thank you again to Alix for doing this interview with us and giving us a perfect autumn read! It’s funny—every time I answer the question of where this book started, I find myself telling a slightly different story. It started when I was staying on my grandma’s farm in Allen County, Kentucky, thinking about sinkholes and caves and everything Kentucky has tried to bury in them. It started when I was a kid, listening to John Prine’s “Paradise.” It started when we bought an abandoned house in Madison County, and it started when we decided to leave it. Really, I guess, the answer is that it started with Kentucky, and with the concept of home. Everything about the genre—the romance, the horror, the fairy tale elements—was really just me trying to fit all the different feelings I have about my home into one book. So I’ll confess that, although I obviously love historical fiction, I do get a little bit itchy at how often the American South is portrayed in the permanent, unchanging past. There’s a sense that authentic southern-ness ends somewhere in the mid-50s—and let’s all take a moment to wonder what happened after the ’50s to damage the wholesome, nostalgic image of the South—and that everything after that is reduced, diluted in some way. Like, try to picture a southern gothic with cell phones; I couldn’t, so I knew I had to write a southern gothic with cell phones. So the needle I was trying to thread was between the sentient house of the gothic (terrifying, hungering, the opposite of the concept of home) and the sentient house of fairy tales (enchanting, cozy, the perfect fulfillment of the concept of home). I stole tropes from both, but tried to interpret them differently? So like, a door slams in a haunted house because it’s evil; a door slams in Starling House because it’s a brat. Oh, yeah. Later in the book I even stetted the spelling of “dreamt” as a direct reference! I actually read a ton of gothics (Beloved, some Faulkner, Housekeeping, Sing, Unburied, Sing, Mexican Gothic, Summer Sons) as aesthetic research, early on, so hopefully there are little nods to all of them. Some—I mean, I have little brothers, who I feel unnecessarily bound to fuss over—but mostly I think it came from my own (fairly traditional) experience as a parent of two kids. I want to write about all the emotions of parenting—the worry and terror, the fumbling love, the daily work of caretaking–but I despise the idea that those experiences only exist within the traditional two-parent biological family. Similarly, the popular reduction of “found family” to “a group of hot young urban gays” doesn’t look anything like my found family. So I ended up with this multi-generational set of relationships, some blood, some not, that make up something like a family. The gothic as a genre is totally about desiring what you fear! And I wanted a gothic heroine who wasn’t punished for giving in to that desire, as so many of them are. To me, Eleanor is what happens when the fear wins out. Not even a little bit, to be honest. I think the problem with me and villains is that I’m fundamentally bored by them, because they’re so fundamentally boring in real life? Like, actual villains don’t commit cruelties because of their fascinating backstories, they do it because it gets them money, power, and comfort. Baine is no less culpable or more interesting because she happens to be a white woman doing the same thing. I think the answer is that I just write…slowly. Like, obnoxiously, counter-productively slowly. There’s the outline, and then a rough draft of the scene, but I can’t actually leave the scene alone until I’ve wrestled every stupid sentence into something I like. I mean, it is a contemporary novel, but it’s a contemporary novel looking backward over one shoulder. I think one of the things you never shake about studying history is the certainty that the present is only explicable to the extent that you’ve explicated the past—so there had to be footnotes and interviews and letters, little glimpses of Kentucky’s past. But because the past isn’t monolithic—because history isn’t a single, objective narrative—the book became a sort of collage of sources and voices. Lee’s is just the easiest to find, because his last name is so recognizable. But you’d find some other Kentucky writers in there, if you looked, and some Kentucky family and friends that only I’d know. And Lee hasn’t written that article, but he has written a novella explicitly about queer monstrosity in Kentucky. The Woods All Black is out in 2024, and if there’s one book I wish I could make people read alongside Starling House, it would be that one. I don’t think I can announce any upcoming projects, other than my next full-length novel, which is about a big sad lady knight stuck in a bad time loop. Honestly, I was always going to write a book about a girl with a sword. Official Book Blurb: “Eden, Kentucky, is just another dying, bad-luck town, known only for the legend of E. Starling, the reclusive nineteenth-century author and illustrator who wrote The Underland―and disappeared. Before she vanished, Starling House appeared. But everyone agrees that it’s best to let the uncanny house―and its last lonely heir, Arthur Starling―go to rot. Opal knows better than to
Review: The Mimicking of Known Successes, by Malka Older
Malka Older’s The Mimicking of Known Successes is a lovely cozy mystery and sapphic romance in a tonally nearish-future SF setting. If, like me, you struggled a bit with author Malka Older’s Centenal Cycle trilogy (I admit I haven’t made it past the first book, Infomocracy), please consider giving this novella a try. It was one of my favorite things to read this year. One of the reasons I had stumbled during Infomocracy was the multiple characters and POVs – sometimes I’m good with that, but I started reading it in 2019, not a great year for me to be challenging myself during leisure time. But TMoKS starts with a tight-focus third-person narrative focused on Mossa, a professional detective, and switches to a first-person narrative from Pleiti, a scholar, so it’s a lot easier to track what’s happening (although intentions and motivations aren’t revealed for quite a while). Also helping with the ease of reading is that although this is science fiction, the tone feels like gaslamp Victorian/Edwardian-style fiction, minus the racism and sexism (there’s still some degree of classism, though, at least with some characters being arrogant about their academic status). Humanity has moved to Jupiter after wrecking the Earth’s environment, with a series of platforms in the upper atmosphere of the gas giant that are connected via a rail system. So as Mossa and Pleiti follow leads from platform to platform, it reminds me a lot of various Sherlock Holmes mysteries where he and Dr. Watson move about tEngland via rail. Also, Pleiti’s university quarters provide tea and scones by the fireside as a welcome warm-up for the pair in Chapter 1, so the mystery is literally cozy. It is also pretty hot in places! Mossa and Pleiti are ex-flames from college, who had a bad breakup. The two have very different interests, competencies, and personalities, but the heat is still there; at least we see that on Pleiti’s side before too long. And when one of them is injured, the other helps bathe the wound clean and has to struggle to keep her mind, emotions and voice under control… Fortunately, frustrations are eventually resolved satisfyingly – but I definitely want to see this relationship continue to progress in future stories. As for the mystery, I love how it spins up step by step (with a few twists and turns along the way) from a missing person to a case with much broader implications. Some SF mysteries are basically just present-day puzzles with a technological gloss, but the futuristic setting here is integral to the mystery and to people’s motivations, and the complex details of the worldbuilding (from simple elements like an atmoscarf that helps one breathe outside, to vital plot-spoilery ones) really immerse the reader into the story. Incidentally, the title comes from humans on Jupiter trying to figure out how to recreate Earth’s environment – Pleiti’s Classics discipline actually centers not so much on interpreting literature as on using literature to infer whole working ecologies, such as cataloging plant life in (implied) Watership Down. It’s certainly not cozy to imagine the devastated Earth, but I’ve been reading some other “cozy catastrophes” lately, where the coziness lies in survivors starting small and building futures together, and this fits that description. Older has said that she set out to write a comfort read, and I believe she succeeded masterfully. Worldbuilding, mystery, characters and romance combine delightfully in this novella. I eagerly await the sequel in February 2024, and, fortified by this lovely story, I may even return to the Centenary Cycle. The Mimicking of Known Successes, available here from Barnes & Noble, has a sort of subtitle these days: “The Investigations of Mossa and Pleiti Book 1.” Yes, that means there is a follow-up coming! The Imposition of Unnecessary Obstacles is available now for preorder. I am definitely looking forward to reading that! Content warnings: Violence, death, past background environmental catastrophe, sexy scenes (not graphic). Comparisons: C.L. Polk’s Even Though I Knew the End (noirish f/f romance-fantasy-mystery), Everina Maxwell’s Winter’s Orbit (mostly cozy m/m romance-SF with some mystery), P. Djeli Clark’s A Master of Djinn (steampunk-mystery with f/f romance). Disclaimers: I received a free ARC of this novella from NetGalley. IIRC, I may have had a few very brief exchanges with Older on social media.
Movie Review: THEY CLONED TYRONE (2023) Directed by Juel Taylor
The They Cloned Tyrone movie has earned critical and general audience acclaim in a little over a month since, and Skiffy & Fanty followers with access to Netflix should check it out if they haven’t already.
Book Review: A Study in Honor by Claire O’Dell
An Americanized retelling of the classic Sherlock Holmes story, set in a future with advanced tech, disastrous civil war, and a diverse main cast, A Study in Honor creates a unique drama that twists the original overdone story into something new. With the leading characters transformed by sex and skin color, O’Dell puts a spin on your typical Sherlock and Watson partnership, and pulls you into a world of intrigue. Dr. Janet Watson is fresh off the front lines of war, with a clumsy mechanical prosthesis that is too big for the delicate surgeon work she does best. With few prospects, and only one friend in D.C., Watson must make the best of a difficult situation. She gets a job, starts therapy, finds a flat and an accompanying flatmate—Sara Holmes, who is secretive, attractive, and, most of all, maddening. Just when everything has seemingly settled, one of Watson’s patients dies suddenly, and then her friend, another doctor on the front lines, dies as well. This sends Watson and Holmes on the path of a secret investigation, a military mission gone horribly wrong, and several more mysterious deaths. But what awaits them on the other end of their investigation could get them both killed if they’re not careful.
Book Review: BLOOD ORBIT by K.R. Richardson
I don’t recall exactly what drew me to picking Blood Orbit out of the many options for potential reviewing here. Likely it was a combination of good experience/trust in the publisher and the description of a crime noir/science fiction blend, a combo of two of my beloved genres. I certainly didn’t recognize the name of the author, and upon finally beginning the novel I had no memory of what that blurb said it was even about. I started reading the electronic copy Pyr had provided expecting a typical slow start. Without the ease of a physical copy I find getting into a novel really challenging while trying to ‘turn’ back to firmly get characters or the seeds of plot to stick in mind. Instead I found little need for that, and my finger tapped through pages in a focused rush to read more. Blood Orbit is exceptionally crafted from its opening, and at no point through its last page did I ever end up feeling like it faltered. Happening to be at Barnes & Noble at the time, I soon decided to get up and just get the actual book, because I already had a feeling this “Gattis File” debut would be one series I’d want to keep up with.
Book Review: The Green Man’s Heir by Juliet McKenna
The story of Daniel Mackmain, son of a Dryad, inspired by Juliet McKenna’s 2012 story “The Roots of Aston Quercus”, is told in her new novel, The Green Man’s Heir. The Green Man’s Heir combines a strong sense of place with a confident use of rural fantasy to create a strong character and excellent worldbuilding.
